[button link=”https://achieveopedia.com/command-center/training-boosters/”] Back to Power Boosters[/button]
Comfort zones also influence attitude. Emotions may over-ride logic. A good example of natural likes and dislikes and how they may affect our attitudes and behaviors is in Mother Nature’s food chain. Most people love little bunnies and have adverse feelings toward snakes. The thought of feeding a little rabbit to a big old snake is repulsive to many. It almost seems immoral. It is not a moral issue, however; it is a comfort zone issue. People who feed live rabbits and rodents to snakes in order to keep them alive are just following the rules of nature. Snake owner’s work from a different comfort zone, or set of attitudes, than those who would refuse to do the action. It can be said that the snake represents a goal. Feeding the snake represents an action.
In life, many people try to avoid what needs to be done to accomplish their goals (i.e., feeding the snake) and, in turn, “kill” the goal. Often, their self-confidence and hope die along with it. This is what happens to many goals. If people are not willing to adopt the attitudes required to accomplish the goal, the goal shrivels up and dies. They avoid the actions that they do not enjoy. Avoiding the certain tasks compromises their actions to the point of ineffectiveness.
Sometimes we may make a mental list of what we are not willing to do to accomplish a certain goal. We seem to feel some moral obligation to avoid certain actions. One reason for crystallizing values in the focus areas is to distinguish comfort zones from morals. We need to ask ourselves, “Am I mentally ready to accept the responsibility that this goal is demanding? Are my attitudes in alignment? If not, am I willing to adjust my attitudes to make this happen in my life?”
One of the greatest personal breakthroughs in life is when we take responsibility for our attitudes. It is emotion management. That is the day we truly become empowered.
Minimum Requirements vs. Maximum Effort
A habit many of us learn at a young age is to look for the minimum requirements for a given responsibility. By the time we reach the fifth grade, we are experts. A teacher assigns a composition; no sooner are we given the topic and all the hands go up to ask, “How many words does it have to be?” We wisely figure that it is a smart idea to establish the minimum requirements before we start down a given path or identify it along the way.
We didn’t abandon this time and effort saving approach to our life task just because we graduated eighth grade. It may have become inappropriate to ask what our minimums are out loud or in public but we have it pretty well figured out where we can cut corners in our lives. It has become part of our natural and automatic thought process. Most often, we aren’t even aware that we are doing it. As we grow into adulthood it becomes a subconscious thinking process. We have the minimums all figured out in way too many areas of our life.
Too often, we make our life decisions based on the minimum requirements needed for the task. It becomes such a part of our nature we don’t even realize when we are doing it, and therefore, cannot consider its impact on our lives. We cheat ourselves of the success we could achieve and enjoy in so many areas of life because we do the minimum to get by. This approach drastically affects the quality of our existence. When the minimum we must do becomes the maximum we are willing to do, the sum of the results of our lives is mediocrity. Many opportunities for growth are lost forever.